First, given enough technology, I think you probably can solve human-related problems. Not necessarily the solution you'd prefer, but you could certainly stop the problem for recurring given a sufficient dedication to technology.
Second, even if I can't solve the problem, I might like to treat the symptoms. Cold medicine doesn't cure my cold, but it does keep my from draining 4 quarts of mucous from my face every day when I have one. I'd prefer a cure, but since I don't have access to one the symptom-preventing medicine is a useful alternative.
Finally, there's no reason you couldn't use technology to help modify human behavior. (Which sounds a lot like "solving human problems with technology", but something tells me you'll disagree) We do it with things like the "your lights are on and the ignition isn't" chime in your car. Or the "low battery" bleep from your smoke detector. Or the flashing red "overload" light on your UPS. None of those alerts do anything to solve the problem or it symptoms, they exist simply to encourage a change in the behavior of nearby humans.
For one thing, that's only evidence that your remote is bad for the task, not that remotes are bad in general. For another, you're assuming that changing the interface technology would improve change the interface design -- that seems unlikely to me. If your DVD player had a voice interface that had the same three options it would be just as hard to use, and somewhat slower.
No, Verizon is paying the content provider -- the source TV station -- for the privilege of inserting their own ads. If Charter had a deal with the source website to insert ads things would be fine and dandy (at least from a copyright standpoint, privacy is another matter entirely).
It is possible that Charter simply has an agreement with DoubleClick or someone to collect more detailed information about browsing habits and override the default DoubleClick ads with better-targeted ads. From a copyright standpoint that would be A-OK, because the source site already allows DoubleClick to select ads for insertion, and DoubleClick has the right to delegate that selection process and/or make use of additional, external information when selecting ads.
On the other hand, Charter could just be shoving ads into every page where their HTML parser can find someplace vaguely appropriate, which would most certainly be a copyright issue. We can only hope they're doing something that stupid, because it would be a great precedent to set, and we'd get to set it at a federal level on the first go.
It's not arrogance. Or it's at least not arrogance alone. As a distro maintainer I can tell you that upstream providers generally do not care about distro-specific patches. Even if you have a patch that would be useful on more than on distro, there's often a reluctance to inherit code to support any installation method other than source tarballs.
That's not to say that upstream providers are unduly arrogant either -- if you're happy with the way your build/install system works, why would you want to maintain patches for some other system that you don't even use? It's extra code to keep up, and requires more testing on more platforms, and it it doesn't make your core package any better.
Their competitor does not have to use GPL software to implement the standard -- they are free to re-implement the standard so long as they don't copy code. Compaq seemed to do just fine in terms of copyright with their whiteroom implementation of the IBM BIOS, and that BIOS wasn't even offered under such open terms as GPL software.
Re:It's as if a thousands hands screamed out in pa
on
iMac Turns 10
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually the original iMac had an upgradable processor and some sort of system-bus interface slot that was later used by several companies to produce FireWire and other cards for the system.
But frankly I think it's ridiculous to expect the average person to upgrade anything on their system -- they'd be hard pushed to install more RAM or upgrade the OS, let alone swap in a new CPU or motherboard. If there were an industry to support it you might get them to *hire* someone to do it, like they do for their cars and whatnot, but they sure aren't going to do it themselves.
However that service industry can only exist if you can sell service for a very small fraction of the replacement cost. A car is worth $10k, so paying a few hundred dollars a year for professional services is reasonable. But there are a lot of people buying $300-$500 computers, and it just doesn't make a lot of sense to pay someone $50/hour plus $50-$100 in parts to upgrade the thing -- you could have a whole new system every 3 years for $100/year.
This isn't something new to computers or electronics or this generation. Think about how many 40+ year-old planes and buses are still in active service, versus the number of 40+ year-old sedans. Cars cost $10k, and rebuilding an old engine is rarely worth the maintenance cost, while busses cost $150k, and an engine rebuild is a much smaller proportion of the replacement cost of the vehicle. If everyone drove busses and had $5k computers, upgrades would be much more popular (as they were when computers did cost $5k), but while prices are low it's just economically unsound.
If you're too far out for DSL, you're too far out for WiMax. The only possible saving grace there is someone other than the telco can put up a WiMax tower if they think it's worthwhile. But you still have to be close enough to enough other people to make it worth someone's while to server you.
It's also not really fair to pretend that dialup is the same class of service as a cable connection. It's a little like saying "Don't like Ford? Well then you can drive a moped with your 2 kids in the saddle bags." -- technically dialup is still the Internet, but it's not a viable alternative in most cases and can't seriously be considered a competing product.
I agree that satellite is available to most people that would have access to cable. But not everyone -- if I have a north-facing apartment, or live behind a hill, I can't get satellite. And other than the latency it's even a comparable product, so for people that can handle the latency (i.e. not remote terminal users or online game players) and who have a view of the southern sky, and who only need ~0.5 - 5 GB transfer per month, I agree that satellite is a viable alternative.
This is all in comparison to users in larger population centers, who likely have access to at least one DSL ISP, and may have access to FiOS, wide-area radio, metro-Ethernet, or any of several other technologies that all offer high-bandwidth, high-usage, low-latency links that are directly comparable to cable service.
As others noted, at least in the context used here, "Internet" is a proper noun. It describes the particular collection of networks we use to do things like post on Slashdot. It does not describe the interconnection of any set of networks, which would be simply "internet".
There are many other examples of words that are only proper nouns in certain contexts: I can go to the upper floor of a building in Upper Michigan, or I can travel east to get from the Midwest to the East. Or to use your example: Use a pencil to write a letter your favorite player on the Pencils, our local sporting team.
Looking at your shadow I can still tell your body type, if given some scale I can make reasonable guesses about your height and weight. I can tell what orientation you're in, if you've got long or short hair, possibly your gender. You're right, I can't draw a picture of your face, but given a list of all 6 billion faces I could narrow down the choices quite a bit before I started rounding up people for a lineup.
If someone has a 12-character password alpha-numeric password the keyspace is about 104^12. If you can determine when the shift key is pressed and which of the 4 rows of keys each character is in, you can make that 13^12, which is 36 bits less keyspace -- almost a 50% reduction over the original 80 bits.
If you don't verify your startup configs, you still can't dial 911 next time the system reboots. And if that reboot occurs unexpectedly 23 months later you'll probably have forgotten whatever change broke the configs, so 911 will be offline much longer.
You can't honestly expect to provide 100% uptime with only one system -- it's simply not possible. Even if you never made mistakes and all your hardware worked perfectly for its entire expected life, you'd still have to replace it from time to time. If you haven't already configured the system with redundant capabilities you're gonna have a hard time installing the replacement and switching over without disrupting service.
And if you do have redundant system you can simply mark one offline, wait currently processing jobs (calls, whatever) to end, and then reboot it. Other than the potential for a failure of the second device while the first is down, there's really no risk (and if you're worried about that you can simply add a third system). Clearly you haven't ever dealt with actual high-availability systems...if you're representative of the carrier world we're all screwed.
And that's not to mention the fact that dialtone service, including 911, does go out from time to time. In my LATA there have been two separate multi-hour, multi-city outages in the past 18 months.
Wouldn't it be a lot easier to simply keep the archive on a live system, and rotate it to new media from time to time as the old media dies and new storage systems become available? After all, if no one is looking after this system, what's to keep it from being forgotten in the basement of a long-abandoned building?
In addition to taking advantage of the falling cost of storage for a fixed-size data set -- making future replacement media purchases much cheaper than redundant media purchases today -- you also have the opportunity to re-process the data into new formats, so that you'll still be able to read it when you want it.
I'm opposed to your physical trespassing, or unauthorized use of my computer networks, but if I leave my hard drive or portions thereof exposed in such a way that you can access it without breaking other laws, you're welcome to copy it.
What you'd want with a dirty copy of OS X and a giant encrypted file I don't know, but you're welcome to have it.
That was an example of science being suppressed in favor of religion
I know that's what they teach you in 4th grade, but as is often the case, it's oversimplified to the point of being absurd.
We commonly depict the Earth as moving around Sol, but that's merely a frame of reference -- Sol could be just as accurately described as orbiting Earth. With both the moon and the sun orbiting Earth, it's not a huge leap to assume that other astronomical bodies do the same. It's not actually true, but it's a logical, intuitive assumption and it takes some relatively sophisticated observations to disprove. Until Galileo, no one had made those observations, and therefore the prevailing model, even outside the political influence of the church, and in full accordance with valid scientific observations, was one of an Earth-centric universe.
Copernicus did model Sol at the center of the universe, but he choose to do so purely for aesthetic reasons -- he had not actually made any observations to disprove a Earth-centered universe, he just liked the way the Sol-centered universe worked out when he modeled it. And while there's some validity to "the simplest solution is often the best" it's a long way from actual science.
The church definitely worked to suppress ideas outside of their line of thinking. And it did act against Galileo, though his astronomical observations are only a footnote in those proceedings -- they wanted to silence him for questioning church dogma (and thus endangering the church's political power) in general, largely outside the arena of science. I'm not saying they liked the church liked his model or wanted to spread it around, but it's hardly the reason they placed him under arrest.
And yes, I keep using "universe" here in the sense that we would commonly use "solar system" nowadays. But I think it's important to point out the difference in perspective that these people had.
If only browsers would FINALLY include support for HTTP+TLS and for TLS upgrades, encryption could even be done transparently to the user.
I'm all for STARTTLS support, but it's not clear to me how it would be any more or less transparent from the user perspective than HTTPS. What am I missing?
They are only submitting forms with a GET method. According to the HTTP specs, GET requests should always be idempotent. If you've got forms that use the GET method and aren't idempotent you should *already* be taking extra precautions avoid accidental use by bots and other automated tools.
Come see me when you re-write java or perl to be self-hosting. Until then you're using C, regardless of how snobbish you are toward the language used to determine where malloc() and free() are called when your memory-ignoring code is executed.
Either that or kidnap Ulrich for long enough to let us put some reasonable string-handling functions into glibc.
As the parent noted, it goes wrong because every choice you make after you initial selection -- including the first switch -- is completely dependent on that initial selection. In other words, after you've made your initial selection, the entropy of the system drops to 0.
That is unless Monty is cutting quantum checks where the value isn't determined until you open the envelope. But even there switches have no impact, because the entropy of the system is constant until the envelope is opened.
First, there's no reason that the frame rate of your video system would be directly related to either the refresh rate of the display or the rate at which it flickers unless you deliberately input data with alternating light/dark frames. LCDs and DLPs typically have internal refresh rates in the 40 Hz to 120 Hz range, and don't have a significant refresh-related flicker in the first place (instead they have backlighting-related flicker in the 100+ Hz range and/or color-wheel related strobing, which isn't quite flicker but also bothers some people). And you certainly don't have a full-color video CRT running at 24 Hz.
Beside that, it's a little silly to talk about "below X Hz" as though the amount of flicker was related only the to the vertical refresh rate and not say, the display type. Even if you limit your discussion to monitor-quality CRTs you still have to consider the persistence of the phosphor. I know it's not a spec that's easy to find, but it's an important part of monitor performance if you're sensitive to flicker.
Multi-sync monitors typically have low-persistence phosphors that allow you to run ridiculously high refresh rates. But that property actually increases the amount of flicker at lower refresh rates, essentially requiring you to run the display faster. Fixed-sync displays (or those with a more limited sync range) have very little refresh-related flicker, because the phosphor persistence in designed to match the vertical refresh rate.
For an easy to produce example, compare a static image on a multi-sync monitor running at 60 Hz vertical refresh to a similar image on a CRT TV -- the TV has much long persistence and much less flicker at low vertical refresh rates.
It's quite possible to design a tube with a low vertical refresh rate without introducing significant amounts of flicker. It's just not possible to run that tube at 180 Hz, and it's easy for people to believe higher number == better product there's been some push to increase the refresh rate in monitors, regardless of what it actually does for performance in the 80 Hz - 100 Hz range that most people will actually use.
The same way you ensure that the people counting your precious hand-written ballots aren't just lying -- you provide a user-verifiable physical output and count it more than once.
Then you get the benefits of electronic input -- like access for the visually impaired, to alternate-language ballots, the ability to correct mistakes, etc. -- without relying on the input device to do all the vote-counting correcting. I expect it would provide a count for quick access to the results, but you wouldn't have to rely on it.
And because the output is computer-generated you can do things to actually improve audibility over traditional hand-written ballots. For one thing, you could print the output onto an optical-scan form, or other machine-and-human-readable, high-accuracy format. You could then buy an optical-scan counting machine from another vendor, and if at the end of the night the numbers from both machines matched up, you could all go home without hand-counting anything. You could also have the machine sign its output so that ballots can be traced back to a particular device, and can be verified as authentic and non-duplicated -- the public could be provided with copies of the ballots to independently verify the results.
But it's storing music on behalf of the license holder, in a folder for the private use of the license holder. If it automatically copied music onto some public share you might have a problem, but the situation you describe is not any different than putting my CD collection into off-site storage that I don't own while keeping a copy on my computer.
If suppressTopSpacingWP didn't exist, that UI element could not work
I find that hard to believe. For that matter I find it hard to believe that you believe it, at least if you think about it. That's like saying that you need a special formatting directive just because WordPerfect 1.1 had a checkbox that said "Set all text to 12 point Times" -- you could simply set the font type to "Times" and the size to "12" without losing any text or changing any formatting.
The file format should not dictate a user interface, nor be dictated by one -- it should simply provide a way to preserve the data needed to accurately recreate the document in any compliant implementation. That leaves implementations free to make their own decisions about what behaviors are document-specific vs. program-wide.
Now if you'd like to stash some implementation-specific data into a comment or other non-document-data section of the file to support your user interface, be my guest. I'm all for preserving UI settings between sessions among implementations that share a common UI. Just don't confuse the UI data with information necessary for reconstructing the document data accurately.
Heck, MS already does this with the HTML generation from Office programs -- they output a reasonably-compatible (for MS at least) HTML document, but it's full of tags intended to help MS Office programs restore various OLE data that has no meaning in HTML. The document contains all the information necessary to accurately render the document in any HTML engine, but also preserves Office-specific data for programs that know what to do with it. Is there some reason all these backward-compatibility hacks couldn't do the same thing?
If you don't want to implement it in your competing office suite, no one is forcing you. If you do want to support documents saved when it was checked.
I'd like to support the formatting implied by that checkbox, so I can render documents consistently with other implementations. But I have no use for the checkbox itself, and I don't see why the effect of the checkbox couldn't be translated into more general formatting directives to produce the same output without requiring a whole separate rending mode.
If you'd like to comment on how some people are not aware of recent changes to the specification, and how those specific arguments against the spec aren't technically sound, be my guest. In some cases, such as the specific comment you replied to, you'd be perfectly justified.
But your language doesn't contest the validity of a particular comment -- even your most recent comment here accuses "most of [us]" of willful ignorance. And your prior comment likewise accuses the community at large of having only political objections to this new "standard". It's a bit hypocritical to make generalized accusations and then dismiss rebuttals as irrelevant because they didn't address the specific comment to which you general attack happens to be attached.
Slashdot Mirror
First, given enough technology, I think you probably can solve human-related problems. Not necessarily the solution you'd prefer, but you could certainly stop the problem for recurring given a sufficient dedication to technology.
Second, even if I can't solve the problem, I might like to treat the symptoms. Cold medicine doesn't cure my cold, but it does keep my from draining 4 quarts of mucous from my face every day when I have one. I'd prefer a cure, but since I don't have access to one the symptom-preventing medicine is a useful alternative.
Finally, there's no reason you couldn't use technology to help modify human behavior. (Which sounds a lot like "solving human problems with technology", but something tells me you'll disagree) We do it with things like the "your lights are on and the ignition isn't" chime in your car. Or the "low battery" bleep from your smoke detector. Or the flashing red "overload" light on your UPS. None of those alerts do anything to solve the problem or it symptoms, they exist simply to encourage a change in the behavior of nearby humans.
For one thing, that's only evidence that your remote is bad for the task, not that remotes are bad in general. For another, you're assuming that changing the interface technology would improve change the interface design -- that seems unlikely to me. If your DVD player had a voice interface that had the same three options it would be just as hard to use, and somewhat slower.
No, Verizon is paying the content provider -- the source TV station -- for the privilege of inserting their own ads. If Charter had a deal with the source website to insert ads things would be fine and dandy (at least from a copyright standpoint, privacy is another matter entirely).
It is possible that Charter simply has an agreement with DoubleClick or someone to collect more detailed information about browsing habits and override the default DoubleClick ads with better-targeted ads. From a copyright standpoint that would be A-OK, because the source site already allows DoubleClick to select ads for insertion, and DoubleClick has the right to delegate that selection process and/or make use of additional, external information when selecting ads.
On the other hand, Charter could just be shoving ads into every page where their HTML parser can find someplace vaguely appropriate, which would most certainly be a copyright issue. We can only hope they're doing something that stupid, because it would be a great precedent to set, and we'd get to set it at a federal level on the first go.
It's not arrogance. Or it's at least not arrogance alone. As a distro maintainer I can tell you that upstream providers generally do not care about distro-specific patches. Even if you have a patch that would be useful on more than on distro, there's often a reluctance to inherit code to support any installation method other than source tarballs.
That's not to say that upstream providers are unduly arrogant either -- if you're happy with the way your build/install system works, why would you want to maintain patches for some other system that you don't even use? It's extra code to keep up, and requires more testing on more platforms, and it it doesn't make your core package any better.
You web server only needs to listen on specific ports, and only needs to read from and write to specific paths. SELinux can enforce those limitations.
You're assuming I'm not already a cold-hearted asshole.
Their competitor does not have to use GPL software to implement the standard -- they are free to re-implement the standard so long as they don't copy code. Compaq seemed to do just fine in terms of copyright with their whiteroom implementation of the IBM BIOS, and that BIOS wasn't even offered under such open terms as GPL software.
Actually the original iMac had an upgradable processor and some sort of system-bus interface slot that was later used by several companies to produce FireWire and other cards for the system.
But frankly I think it's ridiculous to expect the average person to upgrade anything on their system -- they'd be hard pushed to install more RAM or upgrade the OS, let alone swap in a new CPU or motherboard. If there were an industry to support it you might get them to *hire* someone to do it, like they do for their cars and whatnot, but they sure aren't going to do it themselves.
However that service industry can only exist if you can sell service for a very small fraction of the replacement cost. A car is worth $10k, so paying a few hundred dollars a year for professional services is reasonable. But there are a lot of people buying $300-$500 computers, and it just doesn't make a lot of sense to pay someone $50/hour plus $50-$100 in parts to upgrade the thing -- you could have a whole new system every 3 years for $100/year.
This isn't something new to computers or electronics or this generation. Think about how many 40+ year-old planes and buses are still in active service, versus the number of 40+ year-old sedans. Cars cost $10k, and rebuilding an old engine is rarely worth the maintenance cost, while busses cost $150k, and an engine rebuild is a much smaller proportion of the replacement cost of the vehicle. If everyone drove busses and had $5k computers, upgrades would be much more popular (as they were when computers did cost $5k), but while prices are low it's just economically unsound.
If you're too far out for DSL, you're too far out for WiMax. The only possible saving grace there is someone other than the telco can put up a WiMax tower if they think it's worthwhile. But you still have to be close enough to enough other people to make it worth someone's while to server you.
It's also not really fair to pretend that dialup is the same class of service as a cable connection. It's a little like saying "Don't like Ford? Well then you can drive a moped with your 2 kids in the saddle bags." -- technically dialup is still the Internet, but it's not a viable alternative in most cases and can't seriously be considered a competing product.
I agree that satellite is available to most people that would have access to cable. But not everyone -- if I have a north-facing apartment, or live behind a hill, I can't get satellite. And other than the latency it's even a comparable product, so for people that can handle the latency (i.e. not remote terminal users or online game players) and who have a view of the southern sky, and who only need ~0.5 - 5 GB transfer per month, I agree that satellite is a viable alternative.
This is all in comparison to users in larger population centers, who likely have access to at least one DSL ISP, and may have access to FiOS, wide-area radio, metro-Ethernet, or any of several other technologies that all offer high-bandwidth, high-usage, low-latency links that are directly comparable to cable service.
As others noted, at least in the context used here, "Internet" is a proper noun. It describes the particular collection of networks we use to do things like post on Slashdot. It does not describe the interconnection of any set of networks, which would be simply "internet".
There are many other examples of words that are only proper nouns in certain contexts: I can go to the upper floor of a building in Upper Michigan, or I can travel east to get from the Midwest to the East. Or to use your example: Use a pencil to write a letter your favorite player on the Pencils, our local sporting team.
Looking at your shadow I can still tell your body type, if given some scale I can make reasonable guesses about your height and weight. I can tell what orientation you're in, if you've got long or short hair, possibly your gender. You're right, I can't draw a picture of your face, but given a list of all 6 billion faces I could narrow down the choices quite a bit before I started rounding up people for a lineup.
If someone has a 12-character password alpha-numeric password the keyspace is about 104^12. If you can determine when the shift key is pressed and which of the 4 rows of keys each character is in, you can make that 13^12, which is 36 bits less keyspace -- almost a 50% reduction over the original 80 bits.
Quick guide to iPhoneExchange integration:
Step 1: Turn on IMAP support.
Step 2: There is no step 2.
Seriously, complaining that the iPhone doesn't have MAPI support is like complaining that DOS doesn't read files on 400k floppies formatted with MFS.
If you don't verify your startup configs, you still can't dial 911 next time the system reboots. And if that reboot occurs unexpectedly 23 months later you'll probably have forgotten whatever change broke the configs, so 911 will be offline much longer.
You can't honestly expect to provide 100% uptime with only one system -- it's simply not possible. Even if you never made mistakes and all your hardware worked perfectly for its entire expected life, you'd still have to replace it from time to time. If you haven't already configured the system with redundant capabilities you're gonna have a hard time installing the replacement and switching over without disrupting service.
And if you do have redundant system you can simply mark one offline, wait currently processing jobs (calls, whatever) to end, and then reboot it. Other than the potential for a failure of the second device while the first is down, there's really no risk (and if you're worried about that you can simply add a third system). Clearly you haven't ever dealt with actual high-availability systems...if you're representative of the carrier world we're all screwed.
And that's not to mention the fact that dialtone service, including 911, does go out from time to time. In my LATA there have been two separate multi-hour, multi-city outages in the past 18 months.
Wouldn't it be a lot easier to simply keep the archive on a live system, and rotate it to new media from time to time as the old media dies and new storage systems become available? After all, if no one is looking after this system, what's to keep it from being forgotten in the basement of a long-abandoned building?
In addition to taking advantage of the falling cost of storage for a fixed-size data set -- making future replacement media purchases much cheaper than redundant media purchases today -- you also have the opportunity to re-process the data into new formats, so that you'll still be able to read it when you want it.
I'm opposed to your physical trespassing, or unauthorized use of my computer networks, but if I leave my hard drive or portions thereof exposed in such a way that you can access it without breaking other laws, you're welcome to copy it.
What you'd want with a dirty copy of OS X and a giant encrypted file I don't know, but you're welcome to have it.
That was an example of science being suppressed in favor of religion
I know that's what they teach you in 4th grade, but as is often the case, it's oversimplified to the point of being absurd.
We commonly depict the Earth as moving around Sol, but that's merely a frame of reference -- Sol could be just as accurately described as orbiting Earth. With both the moon and the sun orbiting Earth, it's not a huge leap to assume that other astronomical bodies do the same. It's not actually true, but it's a logical, intuitive assumption and it takes some relatively sophisticated observations to disprove. Until Galileo, no one had made those observations, and therefore the prevailing model, even outside the political influence of the church, and in full accordance with valid scientific observations, was one of an Earth-centric universe.
Copernicus did model Sol at the center of the universe, but he choose to do so purely for aesthetic reasons -- he had not actually made any observations to disprove a Earth-centered universe, he just liked the way the Sol-centered universe worked out when he modeled it. And while there's some validity to "the simplest solution is often the best" it's a long way from actual science.
The church definitely worked to suppress ideas outside of their line of thinking. And it did act against Galileo, though his astronomical observations are only a footnote in those proceedings -- they wanted to silence him for questioning church dogma (and thus endangering the church's political power) in general, largely outside the arena of science. I'm not saying they liked the church liked his model or wanted to spread it around, but it's hardly the reason they placed him under arrest.
And yes, I keep using "universe" here in the sense that we would commonly use "solar system" nowadays. But I think it's important to point out the difference in perspective that these people had.
If only browsers would FINALLY include support for HTTP+TLS and for TLS upgrades, encryption could even be done transparently to the user.
I'm all for STARTTLS support, but it's not clear to me how it would be any more or less transparent from the user perspective than HTTPS. What am I missing?
They are only submitting forms with a GET method. According to the HTTP specs, GET requests should always be idempotent. If you've got forms that use the GET method and aren't idempotent you should *already* be taking extra precautions avoid accidental use by bots and other automated tools.
Come see me when you re-write java or perl to be self-hosting. Until then you're using C, regardless of how snobbish you are toward the language used to determine where malloc() and free() are called when your memory-ignoring code is executed.
Either that or kidnap Ulrich for long enough to let us put some reasonable string-handling functions into glibc.
As the parent noted, it goes wrong because every choice you make after you initial selection -- including the first switch -- is completely dependent on that initial selection. In other words, after you've made your initial selection, the entropy of the system drops to 0.
That is unless Monty is cutting quantum checks where the value isn't determined until you open the envelope. But even there switches have no impact, because the entropy of the system is constant until the envelope is opened.
First, there's no reason that the frame rate of your video system would be directly related to either the refresh rate of the display or the rate at which it flickers unless you deliberately input data with alternating light/dark frames. LCDs and DLPs typically have internal refresh rates in the 40 Hz to 120 Hz range, and don't have a significant refresh-related flicker in the first place (instead they have backlighting-related flicker in the 100+ Hz range and/or color-wheel related strobing, which isn't quite flicker but also bothers some people). And you certainly don't have a full-color video CRT running at 24 Hz.
Beside that, it's a little silly to talk about "below X Hz" as though the amount of flicker was related only the to the vertical refresh rate and not say, the display type. Even if you limit your discussion to monitor-quality CRTs you still have to consider the persistence of the phosphor. I know it's not a spec that's easy to find, but it's an important part of monitor performance if you're sensitive to flicker.
Multi-sync monitors typically have low-persistence phosphors that allow you to run ridiculously high refresh rates. But that property actually increases the amount of flicker at lower refresh rates, essentially requiring you to run the display faster. Fixed-sync displays (or those with a more limited sync range) have very little refresh-related flicker, because the phosphor persistence in designed to match the vertical refresh rate.
For an easy to produce example, compare a static image on a multi-sync monitor running at 60 Hz vertical refresh to a similar image on a CRT TV -- the TV has much long persistence and much less flicker at low vertical refresh rates.
It's quite possible to design a tube with a low vertical refresh rate without introducing significant amounts of flicker. It's just not possible to run that tube at 180 Hz, and it's easy for people to believe higher number == better product there's been some push to increase the refresh rate in monitors, regardless of what it actually does for performance in the 80 Hz - 100 Hz range that most people will actually use.
The same way you ensure that the people counting your precious hand-written ballots aren't just lying -- you provide a user-verifiable physical output and count it more than once.
Then you get the benefits of electronic input -- like access for the visually impaired, to alternate-language ballots, the ability to correct mistakes, etc. -- without relying on the input device to do all the vote-counting correcting. I expect it would provide a count for quick access to the results, but you wouldn't have to rely on it.
And because the output is computer-generated you can do things to actually improve audibility over traditional hand-written ballots. For one thing, you could print the output onto an optical-scan form, or other machine-and-human-readable, high-accuracy format. You could then buy an optical-scan counting machine from another vendor, and if at the end of the night the numbers from both machines matched up, you could all go home without hand-counting anything. You could also have the machine sign its output so that ballots can be traced back to a particular device, and can be verified as authentic and non-duplicated -- the public could be provided with copies of the ballots to independently verify the results.
But it's storing music on behalf of the license holder, in a folder for the private use of the license holder. If it automatically copied music onto some public share you might have a problem, but the situation you describe is not any different than putting my CD collection into off-site storage that I don't own while keeping a copy on my computer.
If suppressTopSpacingWP didn't exist, that UI element could not work
I find that hard to believe. For that matter I find it hard to believe that you believe it, at least if you think about it. That's like saying that you need a special formatting directive just because WordPerfect 1.1 had a checkbox that said "Set all text to 12 point Times" -- you could simply set the font type to "Times" and the size to "12" without losing any text or changing any formatting.
The file format should not dictate a user interface, nor be dictated by one -- it should simply provide a way to preserve the data needed to accurately recreate the document in any compliant implementation. That leaves implementations free to make their own decisions about what behaviors are document-specific vs. program-wide.
Now if you'd like to stash some implementation-specific data into a comment or other non-document-data section of the file to support your user interface, be my guest. I'm all for preserving UI settings between sessions among implementations that share a common UI. Just don't confuse the UI data with information necessary for reconstructing the document data accurately.
Heck, MS already does this with the HTML generation from Office programs -- they output a reasonably-compatible (for MS at least) HTML document, but it's full of tags intended to help MS Office programs restore various OLE data that has no meaning in HTML. The document contains all the information necessary to accurately render the document in any HTML engine, but also preserves Office-specific data for programs that know what to do with it. Is there some reason all these backward-compatibility hacks couldn't do the same thing?
If you don't want to implement it in your competing office suite, no one is forcing you. If you do want to support documents saved when it was checked.
I'd like to support the formatting implied by that checkbox, so I can render documents consistently with other implementations. But I have no use for the checkbox itself, and I don't see why the effect of the checkbox couldn't be translated into more general formatting directives to produce the same output without requiring a whole separate rending mode.
If you'd like to comment on how some people are not aware of recent changes to the specification, and how those specific arguments against the spec aren't technically sound, be my guest. In some cases, such as the specific comment you replied to, you'd be perfectly justified.
But your language doesn't contest the validity of a particular comment -- even your most recent comment here accuses "most of [us]" of willful ignorance. And your prior comment likewise accuses the community at large of having only political objections to this new "standard". It's a bit hypocritical to make generalized accusations and then dismiss rebuttals as irrelevant because they didn't address the specific comment to which you general attack happens to be attached.